Microsoft announced yesterday that its new "Microsoft 365 Legacy Experience" will use artificial intelligence to meticulously remove two decades of Office features while charging users an additional $14.99 monthly premium.
"Our AI had to undergo an intensive unlearning process," explained Microsoft VP Jennifer Walsh. "We spent $2.3 billion teaching neural networks to become progressively less efficient. That kind of carefully crafted digital regression doesn't come cheap."
The premium service launches next month with what Microsoft calls "historically verified inconveniences." The AI-powered system requires users to type "www." before every web address and maintains a curated archive of defunct GeoCities pages for authenticity. The neural networks reportedly spent 10,000 GPU hours learning to perfectly replicate the sound of a dial-up modem failing to connect.
A leaked internal document revealed the "Classic Features Roadmap," which includes Clippy providing contextually inappropriate suggestions backed by deep learning analysis of historical user frustration. "Our AI ensures Clippy's advice isn't just wrong – it's wrong in ways that are precisely calibrated to the technological limitations of 2003," Walsh noted.
The company's customer service chatbots have been trained on thousands of hours of archived support calls to provide authentically unhelpful technical assistance. "We're particularly proud of our AI's ability to suggest rebooting the computer regardless of the actual problem," said Microsoft's Director of Legacy Innovation.
Microsoft claims its neural networks now actively monitor user frustration levels through webcams to maintain what it calls "optimal nostalgic distress." The system also automatically converts all documents to Comic Sans while generating increasingly implausible explanations for why the font settings can't be accessed.
When asked why users would pay extra for fewer features, Walsh responded: "Sometimes you have to lose something to truly value it. Also, our market research shows that 73% of managers believe their teams are 'too efficient' with current productivity tools."
The service includes a "Random Compatibility Mode" where files occasionally become unreadable between different versions of Office, requiring users to retype entire documents manually. Microsoft emphasizes that this feature is "working exactly as it did in 2003."
